a system of knowledge, beliefs, patterns of behavior, artifacts, and institutions that are created, learned, and shared by a group of people. Culture includes shared norms, values, symbols, mental maps of reality, and material objects as well as structures of power- including the media, education, religion, and politics- in which our understanding of the world is shaped, reinforced, and challenged. culture that we learn shapes our ideas of what is normal and natural.
the potential power of individuals and groups to contest cultural norms, values, mental maps of reality, symbols, institutions, and structures of power. People debate, negotiate, contest, and enforce what is considered normal, what people can say, do and even think.
research into masculinity and femininity as flexible, complex, and historically and culturally constructed categories. one of the most significant subfields of anthropology. look at ways in which gender is constructed as a central element in every aspect of human culture, including sexuality, health, family, religion, economics, politics, sports, and individual identify formation.
a part-time religious practitioner with special abilities to connect individuals with supernatural powers or beings. called on at times to perform special rituals and ceremonies. they gain their powers through
special training or experience, passing through a journey or test of spirit- illness, isolation, pain or emotional ordeal. they enter a trance though meditation, songs, dance, drugs, etc. implore deities and powers to take action or to provide special knowledge to assist individuals with healing, fortune telling, advice, personal guidance, protection from illness, and control over the weather.
• part of traditional religious philosophy and practice in Siberia and inter Asia, Korea, even in
Madison and Appleton
o widespread
a sens of historical, cultural, and sometimes ancestral connection to a group of people who are imagine to be distinct rom those outside the group.
An ethnic group often thought of as people who share:
o A distinctive culture, national origin, language, race, religion
o A presumed common genealogy or ancestry
o Who identify with one and other
o Who may be identified with one and another.
• "a more
expansive version of kinship"
• if ethnicity is like kinship, then it is also constructed
• ethnicity is a cultural construction, not based on nature/ biology
• "people construct a sense of ethnicity as they organize themselves in relation to others whom they perceive as either culturally similar or culturally different"
• ethnicity is a relation identity category
o choosing who is or isn't like you
• ethnicity (like other forms of identity) is learned, practiced, and
taught.
A political entity, located within a geographic territory with enforced borders, where the population shares a sense of culture, ancestry, and destiny as a people. combines the politics of a state with the cultural/ ethnic implications of a nation. This is a modern phenomenon (19th C)- in the past they were multiethnic ruled by a king, emperor. People did not necessarily identify with the state. This is based on nationalism:
• Nation- state model
includes a unity based on common descent, common language, and shared culture
• Nation-state requires allegiance above family, city, town, etc.
• Institutions like schools key to creating
It is maintained through domination- police, prison and hegemony- currency, language, national anthem, education standardization.
It is an imagined communtity.
• Benedict Anderson (1983)
• Imagined: socially constructed, also because members do not all know each other, are not all
alike
• Print media (newspapers and books) and capitalism key
o All have access to each other through print- a sense of unity
• Create a sense of shared time/space (synchronicity) and unified market
• NS emerges as older regimes lose credibility (divine monarchs, sacred languages like Latin) and new philosophies become popular (democracy, Protestantism)
the forces that spur migration form eh country of origin and draw immigrants to a
particular new destination country.
pushed to migrate from their home by poverty, famine, natural disasters, war, ethnic conflict, genocide, political or religious oppression. pulled to certain places by job opportunities, higher wages, educational opportunities, access to health care, or investment opportunities